Tuesday, 5 January 2016

Which country has recently declared the broadband service as a fundamental right ?

Finland
, officially the Republic of Finland, is a Nordic country in Northern Europe, a peninsula with Gulf of Finland to the south and Gulf of Bothnia to the west. It has land borders with Sweden and Norway to the north and Russia to the east. Finland is part of the geographic region of Fennoscandia, which also includes Scandinavia and parts of Russia.

Finland's population is 5.5 million (2014), staying roughly on the same level with only about 9% increase in 24 years since the last economic depression in 1990.The majority live in the southern regions.The single largest group of foreigners living in Finland are Russians and Estonians, 36% of all of the foreigners (2014). In terms of area, it is the eighth largest country in Europe and the most sparsely populated country in the European Union. Finland is a parliamentary republic with a central government based in the capital Helsinki, local governments in 317 municipalities, and an autonomous region, the Åland Islands. Over 1.4 million people live in the Greater Helsinki metropolitan area, which produces a third of the country's GDP. Other large cities include Tampere, Turku, Oulu, Jyväskylä, Lahti, and Kuopio.

From the late 12th century until 1809, Finland was part of Sweden, a legacy reflected in the prevalence of the Swedish language and its official status. In the spirit of the notion of Adolf Ivar Arwidsson (1791–1858), "Swedes we are no-longer, Russians we do not want to become, let us therefore be Finns", the Finnish national identity started to establish. However, Finland was still incorporated into the Russian Empire as the autonomous Grand Duchy of Finland, until the Russian Revolution of 1917 prompted the Finnish Declaration of Independence. This was followed by the Finnish Civil War in which the pro-Bolshevik Finnish Socialist Workers' Republic was defeated by the pro-conservative "Whites" with support from the German Empire. After a brief attempt to establish a kingdom, the country became a republic. In World War II, Finnish forces fought in three separate conflicts: the Winter War (1939–1940) and Continuation War (1941–1944) against the Soviet Union, and the Lapland War (1944–1945) against Nazi Germany. Finland joined the United Nations in 1955 and established an official policy of neutrality. It joined the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) in 1969, the NATO Partnership for Peace on 1994, the European Union in 1995, the Euro-Atlantic Partnership Council on 1997  and finally the Eurozone at its inception in 1999.

Finland was a relative latecomer to industrialisation, remaining a largely agrarian country until the 1950s. It rapidly developed an advanced economy while building an extensive Nordic-style welfare state, resulting in widespread prosperity and one of the highest per capita incomes in the world. However, since 2012 Finnish GDP growth has been negative, with preceding peak of -8% in 2009.

Finland is a top performer in numerous metrics of national performance, including education, economic competitiveness, civil liberties, quality of life, and human development. In 2015, Finland is ranked first in the World Human Capital and the Press Freedom Index, and as the most stable country in the world in the Failed States Index.

The country has a long legacy of social progressivism, in 1906, before gaining the independence, it became the second nation in the world to give the right to vote to all adult citizens and the first in the world to give full suffrage to all adult citizens.About 73.9% of Finns were members of the Evangelical Lutheran Church of Finland in 2014; nevertheless, the Lutheran Church estimates that approximately only 2% of its members attend church services weekly.

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